Celebs, supporters of Dream Act face off with anti-DACA protesters
For many DREAMERS, or undocumented young immigrants fighting to stay in the country, their battle could depend a lot on what happens in the next few weeks in Congress.
Supporters and...
For many DREAMERS, or undocumented young immigrants fighting to stay in the country, their battle could depend a lot on what happens in the next few weeks in Congress.
Supporters and protestors of those DREAMERS clashed in West LA Wednesday in front of Senator Feinstein's office.
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Las ciudades advierten a las empresas que no cooperen con Trump
Las ciudades advierten a las empresas que no cooperen con Trump
Las ciudades han sido los principales puntos de resistencia contra la política de Donald Trump, en particular sus planes de tomar medidas contra los inmigrantes.
Las ciudades se han...
Las ciudades han sido los principales puntos de resistencia contra la política de Donald Trump, en particular sus planes de tomar medidas contra los inmigrantes.
Las ciudades se han mantenido firmes y proclamado orgullosamente ser santuarios de inmigrantes ante las amenazas de la Casa Blanca de quitarles fondos federales. Han prometido apoyar el acuerdo de París sobre el clima después del sorpresivo anuncio de Trump de que Estados Unidos dejará de respaldar el histórico pacto.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Futures and Commodity Market News: United States : Sanders, Sherman Introduce Legislation to Break Up Too Big to Fail Financial Institutions
Futures and Commodity Market News: United States : Sanders, Sherman Introduce Legislation to Break Up Too Big to Fail Financial Institutions
The bill is supported by the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen, Americans for Financial Reform, Center for Popular Democracy Action and Demand Progress Action. Experts supporting the bill include: Simon...
The bill is supported by the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen, Americans for Financial Reform, Center for Popular Democracy Action and Demand Progress Action. Experts supporting the bill include: Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist, Robert Reich, UC Berkeley, Bob Hockett, Cornell Law School, Jennifer Taub, Vermont Law School, Nomi Prins, former investment banker, and Rep. Brad Miller, Roosevelt Institute.
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Skinny Girl's CEO Bethenny Frankel charters multiple planes to bring supplies to Hurricane Maria survivors
Skinny Girl's CEO Bethenny Frankel charters multiple planes to bring supplies to Hurricane Maria survivors
Bethenny Frankel is turning the full force of her efforts on the disaster in Puerto Rico post Hurricane Maria. As reported by People, the Skinny Girl CEO, B Strong charity spearhead, mother, and...
Bethenny Frankel is turning the full force of her efforts on the disaster in Puerto Rico post Hurricane Maria. As reported by People, the Skinny Girl CEO, B Strong charity spearhead, mother, and Bravo reality star combined a Twitter crowdfunding campaign with her own resources to raise the money necessary to charter four planes full of water, canned goods, diapers, baby food, medical supplies, and more.
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When Lawsuits Protect Hardhats
New York Daily News - April 17, 2014, by Errol Louis - New York is about to embark on a historic building boom — and that has touched off a furious new round in a long-running battle about how to...
New York Daily News - April 17, 2014, by Errol Louis - New York is about to embark on a historic building boom — and that has touched off a furious new round in a long-running battle about how to protect the health and safety of the workers who create the city’s glittering skyline. This month alone, two men have fallen to their deaths while working on midtown buildings under construction — a grim reminder that the skyscrapers we boast about come at a high cost, and sometimes a tragic one.
We’ll see many more projects get off the ground in the months ahead. The de Blasio administration is set to announce plans this week to rebuild areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and in early May will unveil a larger plan for building or maintaining 200,000 units of housing.
That’s a lot of work to be done — and thousands of men and women needed to engage in one of the most dangerous professions in America.
In 2011 and 2012, a staggering 1,513 construction workers died on the job nationwide, more than in any other industry, according to Public Citizen, a national think tank. Thirty-six of them were in New York City.
“You literally see people who are not making a ton of money losing their lives to grow the economy of this city,” says Jose Duffy, a policy advocate at the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group.
“These are people literally dying because employers aren’t putting in basic safety regulations.”
At the center of the current fight is Local Law 240, also known as the Scaffold Law, which allows construction workers who get injured or killed on the job to sue the companies that hired them. The law was passed in the 1880s as New York began constructing the world’s first skyscrapers — and losing workers maimed or killed as the structures went up.
The construction industry has been trying for more than a century to shrink or repeal the law, and allow firms to avoid or limit liability if they can prove that an accident was the fault of the dead or injured worker. Industry lobbyists duly prowled the halls of the statehouse this year.
Lawsuits are a less-than-perfect way to force the industry to take safety seriously, but there aren’t many alternatives. Public Citizen estimates it would take the Occupational Safety and Health Administration more than 100 years to inspect every New York State construction site even once.
So workers sue when they get hurt on unsafe job sites, and insurance companies charge building companies hefty premiums in exchange for paying the claims of those killed or injured workers. A recent report by pro-industry researchers at SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute estimates that the law costs New York $150 million in economic output and 12,000 jobs — expenses imposed by insurance companies, which charge construction firms.
Duffy’s group, in turn, issued its own report this week attacking the methods and motives of the Rockefeller Institute study.
While the political battle goes on in Albany, people like Walter Cabrera are caught in the middle. Speaking through a translator, Cabrera, who came here from Peru a decade ago, told me how his supervisor had him work on a defective scaffold at 240 West Broadway in 2011.
The rig didn’t have hand rails, and Cabrera ended up falling and injuring his knee, wrist and elbow. Three years and two surgeries later, he remains unable to work and is in the process of suing the company that hired him.
While Cabrera waits out the legal process in his Jackson Heights apartment, the building he helped construct — a swank Tribeca condo now called 1 North Moore — has a penthouse that listed at $8 million and units that sold for $5 and $6 million, according to curbed.com.
It would be unthinkably immoral to build the city on the injured backs of disabled immigrant workers. Until there’s a better alternative, it looks like the Scaffold Law is here to stay.
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What Does Black Lives Matter Want?
What Does Black Lives Matter Want?
On August 1 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over sixty organizations, rolled out “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” an ambitious...
On August 1 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over sixty organizations, rolled out “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” an ambitious document described by the press as the first signs of what young black activists “really want.” It lays out six demands aimed at ending all forms of violence and injustice endured by black people; redirecting resources from prisons and the military to education, health, and safety; creating a just, democratically controlled economy; and securing black political power within a genuinely inclusive democracy. Backing the demands are forty separate proposals and thirty-four policy briefs, replete with data, context, and legislative recommendations.
But the document quickly came under attack for its statement on Palestine, which calls Israel an apartheid state and characterizes the ongoing war in Gaza and the West Bank as genocide. Dozens of publications and media outlets devoted extensive coverage to the controversy around this single aspect of the platform, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, The Times of Israel, Haaretz, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Of course, M4BL is not the first to argue that Israeli policies meet the UN definitions of apartheid. (The 1965 International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the 1975 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid define it as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”) Nor is M4BL the first group to use the term “genocide” to describe the plight of Palestinians under occupation and settlement. The renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, for example, wrote of the war on Gaza in 2014 as “incremental genocide.” That Israel’s actions in Gaza correspond with the UN definition of genocide to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by causing “serious bodily or mental harm” to group members is a legitimate argument to make.
The few mainstream reporters and pundits who considered the full M4BL document either reduced it to a laundry list of demands or positioned it as an alternative to the platform of the Democratic Party—or else focused on their own benighted astonishment that the movement has an agenda beyond curbing police violence. But anyone following Black Lives Matter from its inception in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict should not be surprised by the document’s broad scope. Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi are veteran organizers with a distinguished record of fighting for economic justice, immigrant rights, gender equity, and ending mass incarceration. “A Vision for Black Lives” was not a response to the U.S. presidential election, nor to unfounded criticisms of the movement as “rudderless” or merely a hashtag. It was the product of a year of collective discussion, research, collaboration, and intense debate, beginning with the Movement for Black Lives Convening in Cleveland last July, which initially brought together thirty different organizations. It was the product of some of the country’s greatest minds representing organizations such as the Black Youth Project 100, Million Hoodies, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Dream Defenders, the Organization for Black Struggle, and Southerners on New Ground (SONG). As Marbre Stahly-Butts, a leader of the M4BL policy table explained, “We formed working groups, facilitated multiple convenings, drew on a range of expertise, and sought guidance from grassroots organizations, organizers and elders. As of today, well over sixty organizations and hundreds of people have contributed to the platform.”
“A Vision for Black Lives” is a plan for ending structural racism, saving the planet, and transforming the entire nation—not just black lives.
The result is actually more than a platform. It is a remarkable blueprint for social transformation that ought to be read and discussed by everyone. The demands are not intended as Band-Aids to patch up the existing system but achievable goals that will produce deep structural changes and improve the lives of all Americans and much of the world. Thenjiwe McHarris, an eminent human rights activist and a principle coordinator of the M4BL policy table, put it best: “We hope that what has been created carries forward the legacy of our elders and our ancestors while imagining a world and a country profoundly different than what currently exists. For us and for those that will come after us.” The document was not drafted with the expectation that it will become the basis of a mass movement, or that it will replace the Democratic Party’s platform. Rather it is a vision statement for long-term, transformative organizing. Indeed, “A Vision for Black Lives” is less a political platform than a plan for ending structural racism, saving the planet, and transforming the entire nation—not just black lives.
If heeded, the call to “end the war on Black people” would not only reduce our vulnerability to poverty, prison, and premature death but also generate what I would call a peace dividend of billions of dollars. Demilitarizing the police, abolishing bail, decriminalizing drugs and sex work, and ending the criminalization of youth, transfolk, and gender-nonconforming people would dramatically diminish jail and prison populations, reduce police budgets, and make us safer. “A Vision for Black Lives” explicitly calls for divesting from prisons, policing, a failed war on drugs, fossil fuels, fiscal and trade policies that benefit the rich and deepen inequality, and a military budget in which two-thirds of the Pentagon’s spending goes to private contractors. The savings are to be invested in education, universal healthcare, housing, living wage jobs, “community-based drug and mental health treatment,” restorative justice, food justice, and green energy.
But the point is not simply to reinvest the peace dividend into existing social and economic structures. It is to change those structures—which is why “A Vision for Black Lives” emphasizes community control, self-determination, and “collective ownership” of certain economic institutions. It calls for community control over police and schools, participatory budgeting, the right to organize, financial and institutional support for cooperatives, and “fair development” policies based on human needs and community participation rather than market principles. Democratizing the institutions that have governed black communities for decades without accountability will go a long way toward securing a more permanent peace since it will finally end a relationship based on subjugation, subordination, and surveillance. And by insisting that such institutions be more attentive to the needs of the most marginalized and vulnerable—working people and the poor, the homeless, the formerly incarcerated, the disabled, women, and the LGBTQ community—“A Vision for Black Lives” enriches our practice of democracy.
For example, “A Vision for Black Lives” advocates not only closing tax loopholes for the rich but revising a regressive tax policy in which the poorest 20 percent of the population pays on average twice as much in taxes as the richest 1 percent. M4BL supports a massive jobs program for black workers, but the organization’s proposal includes a living wage, protection and support for unions and worker centers, and anti-discrimination clauses that protect queer and trans employees, the disabled, and the formerly incarcerated. Unlike the Democratic Party, M4BL does not subscribe to the breadwinner model of jobs as the sole source of income. It instead supports a universal basic income (UBI) that “would meet basic human needs,” eliminate poverty, and ensure “economic security for all.” This is not a new idea; some kind of guaranteed annual income has been fundamental to other industrializing nations with strong social safety nets and vibrant economies, and the National Welfare Rights Organization proposed similar legislation nearly a half century ago. The American revolutionary Thomas Paine argued in the eighteenth century for the right of citizens to draw a basic income from the levying of property tax, as Elizabeth Anderson recently reminded. Ironically, the idea of a basic income or “negative income tax” also won support from neoliberal economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek—although for very different reasons. Because eligibility does not require means testing, a UBI would effectively reduce the size of government by eliminating the bureaucratic machine of social workers and investigators who police the dispensation of entitlements such as food stamps and welfare. And by divesting from an unwieldy and unjust prison-industrial complex, there would be more than enough revenue to create good-paying jobs and provide a basic income for all.
Reducing the military is not just about resources; it is about ending war, at home and abroad. “A Vision for Black Lives” includes a devastating critique of U.S. foreign policy, including the escalation of the war on terror in Africa, machinations in Haiti, the recent coup in Honduras, ongoing support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the role of war and free-trade policies in fueling the global refugee crisis. M4BL’s critique of U.S. militarism is driven by Love—not the uncritical love of flag and nation we saw exhibited at both major party conventions, but a love of global humanity. “The movement for Black lives,” one policy brief explains, “must be tied to liberation movements around the world. The Black community is a global diaspora and our political demands must reflect this global reality. As it stands funds and resources needed to realize domestic demands are currently used for wars and violence destroying communities abroad.”
Finally, a peace dividend can fund M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, reparations would take the form of massive investment in black communities harmed by past and present policies of exploitation, theft, and disinvestment; free and open access to lifetime education and student debt forgiveness; and mandated changes in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality. The latter is essential, since perhaps the greatest obstacle to reparations is the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education. We have for too long had ample evidence that this is a lie. From generations of unfree, unpaid labor, from taxing black communities to subsidize separate but unequal institutions, from land dispossession and federal housing policies and corporate practices that conspire to keep housing values in black and brown communities significantly lower, resulting in massive loss of potential wealth—the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. Structural racism is to blame for generations of inequality. Restoring some of that wealth in the form of education, housing, infrastructure, and jobs with living wages would not only begin to repair the relationship between black residents and the rest of the country, but also strengthen the economy as a whole.
To see how “A Vision for Black Lives” is also a vision for the country as a whole requires imagination. But it also requires seeing black people as fully human, as producers of wealth, sources of intellect, and as victims of crimes—whether the theft of our bodies, our labor, our children, our income, our security, or our psychological well-being. If we had the capacity to see structural racism and its consequences not as a black problem but as an American problem we have faced since colonial times, we may finally begin to hear what the Black Lives Matter movement has been saying all along: when all black lives are valued and the structures and practices that do harm to black communities are eliminated, we will change our country and possibly the world.
By By Robin D. G. Kelley
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Want To Change The Face Of Politics? Help Teens Register To Vote.
Want To Change The Face Of Politics? Help Teens Register To Vote.
In a recent Center for Popular Democracy report, we detailed examples of youth-focused campaigns for high school registration around the country. In Phoenix, organizers at Living United for Change...
In a recent Center for Popular Democracy report, we detailed examples of youth-focused campaigns for high school registration around the country. In Phoenix, organizers at Living United for Change in Arizona regularly go door-to-door registering eligible students in the 27,000-student Phoenix Union High School district. They also work with school district officials to integrate voter registration in high schools.
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Elizabeth Warren and more than 100 House Democrats blast lack of diversity at the Fed
Elizabeth Warren and more than 100 House Democrats blast lack of diversity at the Fed
The Federal Reserve System is one of the most important institutions in the entire American government. Its composition is also almost shockingly non-diverse, with zero African Americans or...
The Federal Reserve System is one of the most important institutions in the entire American government. Its composition is also almost shockingly non-diverse, with zero African Americans or Latinos serving on the key panel whose decisions impact job creation and the pace of economic growth, despite fairly overwhelming evidence that Fed decisions impact racial groups differently.
What's more, the bodies that choose which people sit on that non-diverse committee are themselves extremely non-diverse — locking into place a system in which the interests of African Americans, Latinos, and lower-income people more generally may be underconsidered in making decisions about unemployment, inflation, and interest rates.
All this is the subject of a letter released at noon today by a group of 111 members of the House of Representatives plus 11 senators, headlined by Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Al Franken, demanding that the Fed pay more attention to diversity in its ranks.
The key graf:
According to a study by the Center for Popular Democracy released in early February, 2016, 83 percent of Federal Reserve head office board members are white, and men occupy nearly three-fourths of all regional bank directorships. The lack of public representation on regional Banks’ boards is even more distressing in light of the lack of diversity among regional Bank presidents and the resulting lack of diversity on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Currently, 92 percent of regional Bank presidents are white, and not a single president is either African-American or Latino. Moreover, at present 100 percent of voting FOMC participants are white, while 83 percent of regional Bank presidents and 60 percent of voting FOMC members are men.
Progressives interested in monetary policy issues have long struggled to engage the public, activist groups, or elected officials in the topic. The focus on diversity from the left-wing Center for Popular Democracy's "Fed Up" campaign that inspired this letter represents a new tactical effort to change that.
Diversity among decision-makers is not, of course, directly a monetary policy issue. But as the letter points out, monetary policy does have significant consequences for racial disparities in employment. They cite research from the Economic Policy Institute "demonstrating that for every .91 percent reduction in unemployment for whites, black unemployment drops 1.7 percent" meaning that African Americans have more to gain from monetary policy that is more pro-growth and less inflation-averse.
Michigan Representative John Conyers who was one of the main driving forces behind the letter issued a statement observing that "Detroit and cities across the country with high minority populations have some of the highest unemployment rates and will be harmed if the Federal Reserve does not consider our needs when they make key policy decisions."
How the Federal Reserve is organized
The specifics of the letter hinge on the structure of the Federal Reserve system, which is, in a word, confusing.
The main hub of the Fed is the Board of Governors in Washington, DC, which consists of a chair, a vice chair, and five other board members. Currently there are two vacancies on the board, and all five board members are white.
In addition to the Board of Governors, there are 12 regional Federal Reserve banks, each of which has its own president and its own board of directors. Each bank's president is selected by its board, with the choice subject to confirmation by the main board. Each regional bank board itself is composed in part of members selected by the private banks of the region and in part of members selected by the central board.
Monetary policy decisions are made by what's known as the Open Market Committee. The committee is composed of the seven members of the Board of Governors (at present, again, there are two vacancies) plus the president of the New York Fed, plus four other regional bank presidents serving on a rotating basis.
The point of the letter is that all these various groups underrepresent women and massively underrepresent African Americans and Latinos.
Today's Fed neglects race
Diversity of membership is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure that a broad range of interests is represented. But there is considerable evidence that the current not-so-diverse group of monetary policymakers is not considering the full range of interests in American society.
Narayana Kocherlakota, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was the only nonwhite FOMC member during his term and offered this observation back in January:
However, there is one key source of economic difference in American life that is likely underemphasized in FOMC deliberations: race. Let’s look, for example, at the most recently released transcripts for FOMC meetings, which cover the year 2010 (my first full year on the Committee). It was a challenging year for the US economy as a whole, as the unemployment rate was above 9 1/4% in every month. But it was especially challenging for African-Americans: In every month of 2010, the unemployment rate among African-Americans was at least 15 1/2%. I did a search of the hundreds of pages of the meeting transcripts. Based on that search, my conclusion is that there was no reference in the meetings to labor market conditions among African-Americans (or Black Americans).
Monetary policymakers, with their needed independence, always risk being (or at least being seen as) insufficiently empathetic to the lives of their nations’ citizens. The Federal Reserve Act has mitigated this risk in the US by ensuring that an appreciation for economic diversity is at the heart of the FOMC’s deliberations.
The details of monetary policy get pretty complicated, and there's rarely been much sign of normal people being interested in them. But issues about who is represented and whose interests get discussed are easier to understand, so you can see why this particular angle is gaining momentum in Congress.
After the release of the letter, Hillary Clinton also weighed-in on the issue via spokesman Jesse Ferguson who offered a statement:
The Federal Reserve is a vital institution for our economy and the wellbeing of our middle class, and the American people should have no doubt that the Fed is serving the public interest. That's why Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole as well as that commonsense reforms — like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks — are long overdue. Secretary Clinton will also defend the Fed's so-called dual mandate — the legal requirement that it focus on full employment as well as inflation — and will appoint Fed governors who share this commitment and who will carry out unwavering oversight of the financial industry
By Matthew Yglesias
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Women workers vow to fight back after Supreme Court ruling
Women workers vow to fight back after Supreme Court ruling
“In early 2017, I became network president and co-executive director at the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of more than 50 grassroots community organizing groups in 34 states,...
“In early 2017, I became network president and co-executive director at the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of more than 50 grassroots community organizing groups in 34 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. In this capacity, I’ve had the opportunity to meet working women all across the country, and I’ve seen firsthand the commitment Freeman Brown is naming. Women, especially women of color, know that being a union member gives them greater economic security than their nonunion sisters have.”
Read the full article here.
A Right to Attorney: NYC Looks at a Possible Fix for the Immigration Court Crisis
The Huffington Post - November 18, 2013, by Nick Malinowski - Everyone in the United States has the right to an attorney in criminal court. The same is not true in immigration deportation...
The Huffington Post - November 18, 2013, by Nick Malinowski - Everyone in the United States has the right to an attorney in criminal court. The same is not true in immigration deportation proceedings -- which are administrative in nature, rather than criminal. This strange gap in the law leaves hundreds of thousands of people on their own to defend against removal by the Department of Homeland Security, a complex and confusing legal procedure frequently conducted in a language the respondents do not understand.
Noncitizens convicted of crimes often face consequences more severe than those demanded by the criminal penalties associated with their charge. A misdemeanor conviction for shoplifting, though unlikely to prompt incarceration, can nevertheless trigger mandatory deportation: dividing families, disrupting communities and preventing people otherwise eligible from seeking asylum. This result is especially troubling in cases where the person may be persecuted or killed for religious or political reasons in their country of origin. Like undocumented immigrants, legal permanent residents are similarly at risk of deportation through this process.
The Vera Institute recently analyzed the 71,767 cases lodged in New York State Immigration Courts between October 2005 and July 2010. They found that 60 percent of detained immigrants did not have an attorney by the time their case was completed. Among the barriers to finding representation are prohibitive costs, high bail rates -- often around $10,000 even for minor offenses -- and the transfer of detainees to far-away locales such as Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Within the studied cases, positive outcomes -- relief or termination -- were reached just 3 percent of the time for detainees without representation.
Unfortunately, those able to retain an attorney are not always better off. A survey of 31 of the 33 judges who preside over deportation hearings in New York, described a poor track record by the immigrant defense bar. Immigrants received "inadequate" legal assistance in 33 percent of the cases studied and "grossly inadequate" assistance in 14 percent of the cases. The vast majority of representation in immigration proceedings in New York (91 percent) is provided by private attorneys. While some obviously provide excellent services, as a class, these attorneys offered the worst representation in this forum when compared to non-profit organizations, pro bono attorneys and even law students.
The immigration representation crisis has gained traction and visibility during the past decade as increasingly harsh immigration laws, along with more intense enforcement, have resulted in a stunning increase in the number of people detained and deported for minor crimes. In 2012 alone, DHS deported 410,000 immigrants.
It is a common misconception that people deported via the criminal justice system are dangerous. When it was launched, Secure Communities -- the federal program linking local law enforcement records to ICE databases -- was advertised as prioritizing the removal of "the most dangerous and violent offenders." Yet nearly 75 percent of people deported under "S-Comm" have not been accused of major crimes. Twenty-six percent actually had no criminal charges at all.
Overall, Secure Communities has led to more harm than safety, according to Families for Freedom, part of the statewide coalition New York State Working Group Against Deportation. The program destroys police-community relationships, perverts notions of due process and justice through disparate treatment of immigrants during legal proceedings, and encourages racial and ethnic profiling, the group says.
Meanwhile the well-documented racial disproportionalities of the criminal legal system are apparent in these cases as well. Spanish speaking residents represent 74 percent of immigrants facing deportation hearings in New York City, despite this group making up closer to 40 percent of the entire undocumented population in the city.
All of this comes at an astonishing cost for taxpayers. The so-called "bed mandate" -- an eleventh-hour add-on to the 2009 Homeland Security spending bill that requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement to keep a minimum of 34,000 undocumented immigrants locked-up at all times, regardless of the crimes alleged to have been committed, costs $2 billion a year. Clearly, private prison companies, which house almost two-thirds of ICE's detainees, are benefiting, with just two -- Corrections Corp. and Geo Group -- collecting nearly $500 million in ICE contracts alone during 2012. Who else benefits from these practices?
As a 2008 New York Times editorial described: "A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully."
The New York City Council has approved a $500,000 grant for local public defender agencies -- Brooklyn Defender Services and The Bronx Defenders -- to begin providing representation to indigent people in immigration proceedings, the first program of its kind in the country. This is perhaps a first step toward creating a system within the immigration courts that is fair and just -- an impossible description for the current state characterized most dominantly by poor legal representation, when attorneys are available at all.
However, the project will assist just 190 people during the first year, and there is no guarantee the funding will be continued past 2014. While the program will likely help these represented immigrants, it seeks to provide attorneys to only a small number of those who might otherwise qualify for assistance. It would cost $7 million a year to provide legal counsel for every indigent deportation case, a small amount considering the annual Department of Corrections budget of $1.08 billion.
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3 days ago
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